


mustelae vestimenta non gerunt

by Anonymous



Category: Hogan's Heroes (TV 1965), MASH (TV)
Genre: Exactly What It Says on the Tin, Gen, Id Fic, Post-Canon, Unreliable Narrator, my two favorite finks meet
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-11-18
Packaged: 2021-02-08 12:29:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21476038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: "weasels don't wear clothes"or rather, these weaselly men do, but they have things to learn, about being pompous, and faking it...
Kudos: 3
Collections: Anonymous





	mustelae vestimenta non gerunt

**Author's Note:**

> (more or less HH canon-typical mentions of a number of things in WWII Germany. Frank remains kinda jingoistic and at times hateful to other nationalities.)

The stove broke, to start with, the nice new-as-of-two-years-ago electric stove, so Louise said the girls could stay over and have dinner at their friends' house, and they'd have dinner out for once.

Which meant Frank, as an upstanding surgeon, would have to wear a coat and tie (he never thought he'd say this, but it almost made him miss wearing a uniform for formal), and therefore a trip to the dry cleaners, outside of which...

Look, Frank Burns had never meant to meet his newest patient outside the office, but it was fairly unmistakable who it was when he wore a monocle, of all things, and a tie with his employer's logo on it, proclaiming "Schultz Toy Company since 1949" over a print of teddy bears. Scuttlebutt had it this man was a former Nazi, and he had the audacity to go around with teddy bears on his tie!

The almost-definitely Wilhelm Klink nodded warily at him--acknowledgement, and deferrence, but not exactly a proper greeting. Out of not knowing what to do (and was the man going to ask what sort of people Frank associated with, before he'd get on with his appointment, in two days' time?), Frank returned the nod. 

The man sunk his head and raised his shoulders, almost like a turtle, perhaps, but it gave him the general air of a reticent vulture. And then he nodded again.

Frank whined, under his breath, and hoped desperately no one heard him. Had he accidentally gotten mixed up in some Flagg-esque scheme where this was a code? Was he wearing the wrong thing that sent some sort of signal? He didn't like it, and certainly the proper response would have involved being less petulant and more adult, but he didn't know what to say to the German bookkeeper of the Schultz Toy Company, at their new Indiana factory. 

Klink sighed. "Forgive me," he said with a light German accent, although Frank was unsure what he was apologizing for. "Wilhelm Klink, I work for the toy factory."

"Dr. Frank Burns," said Frank, and supposed miserably he might as well extend his hand, no matter how foolish it could be to expect civility from the man. "Your English is very good."

The man colored, as if he had touched on a sensitive topic "So you're the surgeon the physician referred me to," he said lightly, though not smoothly. "I am not certain I shall have the surgery after all--I am led to believe the recommendation may have been in error, but perhaps you could provide the second opinion anyway."

"Uh, sure," Frank said, his nerves coming through in his voice.

"So I'll see you at my appointment, then?" Klink said, and probably meant it as goodbye--Frank could tell that. Only, he moved to open the door to the dry cleaners, to Frank's dry cleaners (to the only one within two miles), where Frank Burns still needed to go. The doctor stood there awkwardly, not answering the question and not sure whether to let the German hold the door for him. 

Klink gave him a funny look, made funnier by the monocle, and pulled open the door. "Are you also coming into the dry cleaners, Dr. Burns?" he asked in perfectly gentlemanly fashion.

"Yes, um. My suit jacket needs cleaning."

Klink nodded, as if he found this an eccentric comment (which it probably was but it was true). "They do that every so often. Mrs. Lee, is my coat ready? And President Schultz asked if I could pick up his suits. At least the blue one that got glue spilt on it."

For some reason Frank was so flustered he didn't put two and two together, and he repeated with an unfortunately cowardly confusion "President Schultz?"

"The owner of the toy company?" Klink offered, with only a little more understanding of the exchange.

Frank's curiosity got the best of him, here in a dry cleaners that smelled faintly of chemicals. "How--how did you end up working for a toy factory?" There, at least it sounded like a normal question anyone could ask. It's not Frank Burns the zealous patriot being too weird about someone who isn't properly American, probably. (His brain supplied, without being asked, the fact that the citizenship test for naturalization demands more knowledge of things than the average citizen probably has.)

Klink smiled a brittle, purely polite smile. "Schultz and I used to work together. In the, ah, air force, although purely a ground position when we were colleagues there."

And Frank Burns failed to stop his mouth running on: "Oh, I was in the army, the four oh seven seventh Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, in Korea."

Klink's expression faded, and Frank's brain yelled at him that this is a quandary he can understand (also that, if honest, Klink's about to say something about Nazis), about not being able to be that proud when you're pressed about your background, and trying to be proud of the thing even though you don't actually fit in with it and actually no one else around you is enthusiastic and yes alright Frank understood it was very sober matter, so many people on the edge of death, but there wasn't any other way he knew to sort of... cling to his sanity. And probably Mr. "Air Force" (does he really mean the Luftwaffe?) didn't actually have that sort of sober almost-remorse, probably he was a soulless bastard even if that doesn't explain how he can work with toy companies (_Stalin!_ something screamed in his brain. _He's a brownshirt trying to recruit for the Hitler Youth!_ Which wasn't quite a coherent thought, but he thought he meant that if you made something lovable for the kiddies...)

Frank thought of Father Mulcahy and the Korean orphans, and a part of his brain that sounded strangely like the late Henry Blake commented that Klink seems almost more like a brown-nose than a brownshirt. (As for how he went from empathy to revolting suspicions on a dime, Frank Burns has never quite trusted himself, at some level. Always been too afraid he'd go along with some lemmings at the wrong time and ruin everything). His ears tuned back in in time to hear the German grumble "--you'd know what the Luftwaffe was."

"Uh--" Frank didn't know what to say, having missed the first half of whatever it was Klink said. 

"He only said you probably don't understand his language. You don't understand Korean," Mrs. Lee pointed out, pointedly. Which was true, and made it a little awkward that 75% of the counter staff at his dry cleaners were Korean. Well, not that in and of itself--they spoke English or at least got along well enough for clothes cleaning vocabulary, but the fact that Frank fought--well, doctored--for a war in a country for long months and hadn't picked up enough of the language to say "Hello" "where does it hurt?" "Thank you" or "run" said something about him, at least to Mrs. Lee, as did his patriotic intolerance for Reds and by implication North Koreans. He was pretty sure most of the army men with higher rank (not necessarily Blake, or Potter, and certainly not Pierce who was still a mere Captain) would say it didn't matter...but Frank Burns had found that opinion didn't matter a lot in Indiana, and especially not inside his dry cleaners. Not a hill of beans.

"Well," Klink mused, surprisingly seriously, "Korean cultural exchange with the English speaking world has been more limited, and I believe the languages aren't related, so he would be at more of a disadvantage."

"I learned English," Mrs. Lee told him.

Klink nodded. "Yes, it certainly is far from impossible. How much do I owe you, Mrs. Lee?"

She told him, and then looked to Frank while her husband fetched the bundle of things Klink was here to pick up.

"Can you have my suit cleaned and pressed by five?" Frank said, and put it on the counter. Easy enough, really but geez, this was proving to be the kind of errand that made him wary of taking on too many of them. He knew, at least pretty acceptably, what to do as a doctor with authority over a patient, but even though errands ought to be pretty scripted as well, there was still a certain tension, like he was going to get himself laughed at at any minute, especially if it went as wild as this had, with the encounter and his apparent inability to shut up. (He told himself it didn't matter if they laughed, only it kind of did, because if he really got on the wrong side of people, it wasn't as if Uncle Sam had really given him authority above them or insisted they deal with him, and he might have to, for instance, find another dry cleaners. He hated pranks and he didn't like disorder, at least if he couldn't do anything about it.)

Mrs. Lee was less nice to him than to Klink _but_ he had to admit that the toy company employee (what _did_ he do there?) had been more polite than he had, and even if he did annoy her, had likely been doing so for less time than Frank. "Yes, Dr. Burns, it will be ready. Now go and talk about your army stuff somewhere that is not my workplace."

Klink looked at him curiously, and then tried, Frank supposed, to open the door and hold it open, but this time the doctor made the executive decision that Klink's arms were too full and he would return the favor. "What did you do in the Luftwaffe?" Frank found himself asking, as they stepped outside.


End file.
